Permanent Error

Hugo’s latest exhibition, ‘Permanent Error’, shown recently at the Michael Stevenson Gallery, presents a dystopian world of a different kind – and in a greatly reduced, sombre colour range. Against a background of smouldering rubbish dumps, heaps of recycled electronic equipment sent from western countries and ostensibly intended to bridge the digital divide between aider and aidee - in this case, Ghana - are set alight. The portraits in this series are of the red-eyed men who engage in this toxic and exhausting labour. The desperation and misery of these men who must spend their lives burning the plastic in order to extract minute scraps of valuable metals is palpable.

A generation ago, the men would have been eking out their living on the same land by subsistence farming, and the cows which wander over the rubbish heaps sustained by goodness knows what are sad echoes of this agrarian past. Life may not have been easier then, but at least it was free of the pollution of air, soil and water caused by the poisonous heavy metals of discarded first world technology.

In the first gallery, the viewer was surrounded by large-scale prints of the men, their cattle, and details of these dumps. In the next, Hugo set up a video installation in which a dozen or so monitors formed a parabolic curve around the room, each monitor showing one of Hugo’s workers standing still against a background of the burning activity.

Having spent a considerable time looking at the large number of photographs in the first gallery, the video installation felt to me rather like more of the same, just slightly animated and without the crystalline detail characteristic of Hugo’s photographs. Projected at a life-scale size in a larger space, without the photographs, I think I would have reacted to the videos differently. But as exhibited at the Michael Stevenson, this double presentation of the same subject material seemed to detract rather than add to the overall impact  of ‘Permanent Error’.

The subject of the life sustained by the rubbish dumps of Africa is not new. One thinks here of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s child scavengers in Mozambique, and Mikhael Subotzky’s Beaufort West series. For years, the rubbish dump which flanks Crossroads in Cape Town has been known as ‘the free O.K.’ and people wait daily for the arrival of the garbage trucks with weary anticipation.

Nonetheless, there is something very disturbing about a situation in which the rubbish is not even locally generated, but has actually been shipped in in what seems a spirit of deep cynicism, or of dumping old technology under the guise of ‘helping Africa’.

Hugo’s bleakly evocative photographs, taken over the period of a year, make it clear why the locals call the area of the dump 'Sodom and Gomorrah'.  The ‘Permanent Error’ series deserves to be widely shown, not only because the photographs themselves exude a dark power, but also for the issues they raise. In 2011, the series will be published in book form by Prestel.